Dawn of Forever (Jack & Jill #3) (2 page)

“When did cutting become your thing again?” Jackson seethed, squeezing her arm until she winced, releasing the glass. He wadded the front of his shirt to grab it, then pulled it from his shoulder with a grunt.

“Did you kill him?”

He was wrong. The pain that bled from her eyes held as much desperation as AJ’s had possessed. The blood oozing from her hand that stabbed the glass into his shoulder signified her lack of readiness to hear the truth.

“I took away the pain.”

“You murdered him. You’re a fucking murderer!” The napkin from her non-bloodied hand fell on the floor, absorbing the water from the vase. The black words disappeared into blotchy stains. “No! No! No!” Jillian snatched it up, holding her breath as the ink-stained water dripped from the edge.

Jackson watched her fade … watched her die right along with AJ’s last words to her. She’d risen from the grave so many times, but even she had her limits. Would she ever come back from this?

“I hate who I’ve become.” Jackson applied more pressure to his stab wound.

Jillian hugged the napkin to her chest. Silent sobs racked her body.

“I hate our past. I hate not feeling human. And the list of regrets in my life grows more every day. But I will
never
regret taking AJ’s life.”

“Oh God …” Jillian cried.

He picked her up, wincing as more blood seeped from his shoulder.

“You killed him … why … why … why?”

“To save you,” he whispered in her ear, carrying her to the door. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for his sister. If it meant taking all her anger, all her tears, and all her pain, that’s what he would do. Death was AJ’s fate—a painful, undignified, miserable death. His sister couldn’t see past her blinding love. Jackson couldn’t save AJ, no one could, but he could save his sister.

“I hate this world. I
hate
it so fucking much.” Her voice broke, shattering with each word.

“I know, Jess.”

Jillian looked up at him through puffy eyes. He kissed her forehead. “Don’t look at me like that. You’ll always be Jessica to me.”

“Fin de journée,” she whispered.

End of Day.

He didn’t respond. Day—maybe it wasn’t the end.

*

Love and loss
became the unbreakable pattern of Jessica and Jillian’s life. She hated her brother for taking something that wasn’t his to take. Maybe she hated herself too. Did her pain overshadow AJ’s? If he would have asked her to take his life, would she have been able to do it? The questions haunted her, but so did the answers.

“Eventually you’re going to have to talk to me again.”

Jillian shoved clothes into a bag.

Jackson sighed, plopping down on her bed. “I should be going with you.”

She stopped, leveling him a death glare for a few seconds before resuming her packing.

“How’s your hand?” His hand pressed to his own shoulder still bandaged from the stitches.

Jillian received fifteen stitches of her own from grasping the glass dagger to stab Jackson two nights earlier.

“Mrs. Baker left me a message that she no longer will be taking lessons from me. Maybe I did overreact.”

Jillian paused again to give him the
ya-think?
look. Hating Jackson wasn’t easy, but it’s all she had. The anger served as motivation to keep moving, and she needed every ounce of life-propelling effort she could muster to make it to Portland for AJ’s funeral.

What would she tell his family? They believed she’d been with him when he died. The self-imposed silent treatment prevented her from asking Jackson about AJ’s last words. The last words AJ gave her were nothing more than blotchy ink on a blood-stained napkin. How fitting that her entire past be tainted with blood.

She just wanted one decision to be her own. When G.A.I.L. chose to have their fake deaths be suicides, she didn’t have any say in the matter. Leaving Luke behind meant leaving him with the belief that she didn’t love him enough to live for
him.
He spent almost a year believing she gave up on herself … gave up on them. If only he could have known that he was
everything.

Jillian zipped her suitcase and hauled it toward the front door. Feeling a rush of anger, she turned.

“I’m not coming back after the funeral. I need some time alone to figure out if I can forgive you, because right now what you did feels unforgivable. Don’t call me because I won’t answer.” She tossed her phone on the table.

Jackson stared at it, overwhelmed with defeat. They’d been through the unimaginable and survived the un-survivable, but what he did broke a bond that should have been unbreakable.

“The texts?”

She shook her head. “They can come for me and we’ll see who meets their maker first.”

*

The plane headed
to Portland, but Africa was her first choice—Africa, the middle of China, Antarctica, or anywhere that qualified as the farthest possible distance from AJ’s dead body, Jackson’s messed-up intentions, and the painful memories of Luke.

Exiting the secured area of the airport, she homed in on a large sign with her name on it held by a middle-aged woman wearing a black pantsuit and dark red hair pulled tightly into a bun. Jillian paused a few seconds as the anxious people behind her brushed past with a few shoulder bumps and bags jolting the one slung over her shoulder. The woman’s eyes surveyed the oncoming storm of people, not stopping on Jillian with any sort of recognition.

The uncertainty of how AJ’s family would welcome the woman who stole their son’s last days felt like a brick resting on her heart until that point. One of them had arranged to have her picked up at the airport and just like that … her heavy heart lightened a bit.

“I’m Jillian Knight.” She forced a small smile for the lady. The smile felt foreign to her lips. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d truly smiled.

“A pleasure, Miss Knight. Do you have any checked bags?”

Jillian shook her head.

“Very well. If you’d like to follow me, I have a car waiting for us.”

Jillian followed her to the exit like a zombie, having not slept more than a few hours each night since she and AJ arrived back in Omaha. It had begun to take its toll on her body and mind.

“I’ll put your bag in the back.”

Jillian forced another smile as the woman held open the door to a white SUV with tinted windows. After relinquishing the bag, she climbed into the back seat and sighed, feeling her whole body deflate. In twenty-four hours she would be on a plane to someplace far away from the men who all claimed a piece of her heart, a shred of her humanity, and had a hand in her feeling of utter ruin.

The driver opened the back hatch. Jillian’s bag landed with a
thunk
. “Traffic is not too bad today. We should be at our destination before too long, Miss Knight.”

Jillian barely registered the voice behind her until it was an icy whisper in her ear. “Or do you prefer Miss
Day
?”

A needle plunged into Jillian’s neck two seconds before everything went black.

F
rigid shock sent
Jillian’s body into jerking convulsions. Her eyes flew open. Sharp pain cut through the skin along her wrists and ankles bound with rope and zip ties. She winced from the pain and piercing light, the kind that felt like staring into the sun until everything burned white and then faded to black again. Every inch of her body shivered with pin-pricking goose bumps because every inch of her skin was exposed.

“Funny how you’re the crazy one, yet I got sent to the psych ward for five. Long. Years.”

Jillian squinted one eye open, twisting her head side to side, searching for the slightest reprieve from the light and a glimpse of her abductor. No such luck.

“But you know what happened in those five years?”

“You lost every one of your fucking marbles?”

Another wave of icy water crashed into Jillian’s face, wedging her restraints deeper into her skin as she jumped in response. The stitches in her hand ripped away from her wound each time she tugged against the zip ties.

“Try again, whore. I’ll help you out a little. I’ve been texting you hints for months now.”

The infamous biblical texts.

“You memorized verses in the Bible for five years?”

“I found God.”

Jillian chuckled. Giving up on trying to see anything, she closed her eyes, dropping her chin to her chest. “God was in the psych ward?”

“I met a man in there who was a preacher. His wife committed suicide then something inside of him snapped. Love can do that to you. He read the Bible to me every day. It was so cathartic to purge my sins. God has forgiven me.”

“Forgiven you for what?”

“We’ll get to that.”

Jillian gasped as cold water doused her naked body again. “Dammit!”

“Consider this a sort of baptism—a washing away of your sins.”

“W-what sins?” she shivered, teeth chattering.

“Sex with a married man.”

“N-no …”

“Yes! You fucked my husband and so did your mother.”

Her captor’s insanity knew no boundaries. Jillian squeezed her eyes tight, continuing to shake her head.

“What are you … talking about?”

“I-I apologize,” the woman said, in a tight, labored voice. The hollow breath of an exhale followed a long puffing. “I won’t lose my temper again. I need you to trust me so you will repent and I can absolve you of your sins before I put an end to your life.”

Jillian had no qualms with death, but repenting and
trusting
the baptizing psycho for some twisted sort of absolution of her sins wasn’t ever going to happen. She grew up going to church, and in spite of the times in her life that felt like the opposite of a blessing, she believed there had to be something—
someone—
greater than the whole of humanity. The voice before her did not represent anything greater than the grimy floor beneath Jillian’s bare ass.

“I have a funeral to get to. Sorry my mother and I had an imaginary threesome with your husband. Sorry I cheated on a history test in the seventh grade. Sorry I dodged a speeding ticket when I was sixteen by claiming to have just started my period. Does that do it for you?”

“Yeah, about that … Sergeant Monaghan’s funeral was yesterday. You’ve been out of it for a little while. I may have overdone it a bit on the tranquilizer, but with your history I couldn’t take any chances.”

Aric James …

Jillian clenched her teeth like an animal ready to tear apart its prey. Cage, AJ’s parents, Dodge and Lilith, they paid their final respects to him without her. Some things could never be undone. AJ—she’d never see him again. The coward hiding behind the glare of lights would die. Two men were ripped from her life. Her actions no longer mattered. Jessica and Jude—Jillian and Jackson—would always be killers. New identities in a city surrounded by miles of manure changed nothing.

“I’m going to kill you.”

The woman returned a cynical laugh. “That’s quite the declaration coming from someone naked and hog-tied.”

“Fuck!” Jillian seethed. Pain radiated down her arm from the razor-tipped arrow that had just sunk into her shoulder.

“I can’t break your neck. Hell, it took me thirty minutes to get your body dragged down here. But I can land these in any part of your body with laser precision. So keep that in mind as you plan my death.”

“What do you want?” Jillian grunted, holding still to prevent the arrow tip from moving.

“I want to prove that I’m not a fool. All of you will see that I’m smarter than the rest of you combined.”

“All? Who’s all of you?”

“G.A.I.L.”

Releasing a slow breath, Jillian let the pain in her shoulder go and concentrated on the reality of her situation. The woman knew G.A.I.L., therefore she knew everything.

“Good girl. You were trained to not say anything. That’s fine. I’ll do the talking. Guardian Angels for Innocent Lives. It’s quite poetic and beautiful. Wouldn’t you agree? Named after Gail Brighton, wife to founder, Edgar Brighton, mother to Peter Brighton and
me
.”

“They only had one child.”

“Speaking already, are you? Not as good at following the rules as I thought. You are correct.
They
had one child together, although we both know Peter was never actually born. He died in the womb the day she was murdered. Gail had two children. I was her first. My father left when I was seven. My mother married Edgar five years later because she was pregnant with his child, Peter. Edgar never liked me. He thought of me as the poster child for childhood obesity, and I looked nothing like my mom so all he saw in me was my father. He shipped me off to boarding school. I returned home three weeks shy of winter break to attend the funeral of my mother and brother—half-brother.”